Blogs

The brand new BASIS Game Management course is aimed at all individuals who have responsibility for managing a shoot, including head keepers, singlehanded keepers, estate managers, land agents, landowners, shoot managers and shoot captains.

GWCT is working hard to help these vulnerable species. At our research and demonstration farm, Auchnerran in Aberdeenshire, we are fortunate to have thriving populations of lapwing, oystercatcher and curlew

As we take another step firmly towards winter, falling temperatures herald the return of our migrant woodcock - over the next few weeks they will complete their inconceivably long journeys from breeding sites across Scandinavia, Finland, the Baltic states and Russia. 

"Since scraping the side of my dad’s Mini Countryman in lockdown last year, I have had a deep-set fear of driving big cars that are not my own. Imagine my horror when I started my placement at the GWCT and learned that we would be using company cars to travel between sites!"

The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) has a long history of pioneering research on woodcock populations and migration. 

This summer, GWCT scientists were working near Exmoor, looking at the effect that winter game crop plots may have had on breeding songbirds the subsequent spring. 

Earlier this month, the High Court rejected an application for judicial review of Defra’s burning regulations. 

It is a time of change at the GWCT’s Allerton Project, as summer gives way to autumn and the focus of research shifts again for the upcoming winter of both data collection and ongoing analysis.

The recent purchase of Pentwyn Farm by the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust has raised much discussion across farming communities where farms are being bought up by non-farming interests to plant trees or focus purely on biodiversity.

The plan, launching later this year, sets out how to avoid curlew becoming extinct as breeding bird in Wales by 2033 and the wider benefits to society, benefits for key species of conservation concern and benefits for climate change that flow from management for Curlew.